My gaze is clear like a sunflower
My gaze is clear like a sunflower.
It is my custom to walk the roads
Looking right and left
And sometimes looking behind me,
And what I see at each moment
Is what I never saw before,
And Iʾm very good at noticing things.
Iʾm capable of feeling the same wonder
A newborn child would feel
If he noticed that heʾd really and truly been born.
I feel at each moment that Iʾve just been born
Into a completely new world …
I believe in the world as in a daisy,
Because I see it. But I donʾt think about it,
Because to think is to not understand.
The world wasnʾt made for us to think about it
(To think is to have eyes that arenʾt well)
But to look at it and to be in agreement.
I have no philosophy, I have senses…
If I speak of Nature itʾs not because I know what it is
But because I love it, and for that very reason,
Because those who love never know what they love
Or why they love, or what love is.
To love is eternal innocence,
And the only innocence is not to think…
Notes
Pessoa captures the ultimate state of zen-like presence, stripping the act of seeing of all heavy intellectual analysis and philosophical baggage. It serves as a vital anchor for July’s exploration of lightness, demonstrating that true freedom begins when we stop forcing complex meanings onto a world that simply wants to exist. By celebrating a gaze that is completely unburdened by memory, worry, or hidden motives, the poem invites us to look at reality with the clean, uncomplicated transparency of a sunflower turning toward the light. #poetry #pessoa #Portuguese #experience #self